Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (81 page)

“Man, that is
some story
…” Gordon says. He’s read a dozen or so Gnostic creation myths similar to it, but never one as sublime as Mani’s. In the back of his mind, however, he wonders if it really
is
Mani’s creation myth, and not just Lloyd’s intentionally warped Masonic interpretation of it.

“That Mani guy sounds like he was high on some damn good drugs,” says Skip, a bit wistfully.

“Actually, there’s a strong argument to be made that the Manichaeans were using hallucinogenic mushrooms as a sacrament,” Lloyd says. “First off, the Manichaeans were vegetarians. They believed fruits, grains, and vegetables contained higher concentrations of the Light, since plant life didn’t indulge in copulation as animals did, which diluted the Divine Spark by spreading it ever more thinly through successive generations. And they believed mushrooms had the purest concentrations of Light of all, because mushrooms were thought to be ‘seedless.’”

“I guess they hadn’t heard about Terence McKenna’s intergalactic mushroom spores,” says Gordon.

“I’m sure they hadn’t,” says Lloyd. “There’s also historical evidence indicating that 12th-century Manichaeans had migrated to China and provoked the ire of the Chinese authorities by eating great quantities of ‘red mushrooms.’ In 1968, an amateur mycologist (and Vice President of J.P. Morgan & Company) named R. Gordon Wasson published a book called,
Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality
, in which he identified those ‘red mushrooms’ as fly agaric–also known as
Amanita muscaria
–the same mushroom used by Siberian shamans for their vision quests.”

“I thought those were poisonous mushrooms,” D.H. says, “not the good kind that grows on cow manure.”

“You’re right…
Amanita
mushrooms can be fatally toxic, especially when eaten raw,” says Lloyd. “But if mature fly agarics are sun-dried–or baked into ‘bread’–their toxicity is considerably diminished. As an alternative method of detoxification, the leader of a mushroom cult could slowly build up a tolerance to the fly agaric’s poisons by eating small but ever-increasing doses of it over a long period of time–perhaps years…. All during that time, the hallucination-inducing chemicals from the mushrooms would be passing unmetabolized through the leader’s urine, while their toxic effects would be mollified somewhat by filtration through his liver. When drunk by the leader’s flock, that urine would cause hallucinations. The Manichaeans, just so you know, had been accused of being urine-drinkers.”

“Oh that’s just
gross!
” Skip groans.

“
Ick!
” Twinker seconds.

“It kind of makes you think twice about that whole business with Jesus turning water into wine,” Gordon says pragmatically.

“Even if he
was
Jesus,” declares Jimmy, “I still wouldn’t drink his piss.”

“There’s been some scholarly debate about whether the historic Jesus actually existed,” Lloyd says. “One of the original translators of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a man named John Marco Allegro, is convinced Jesus
didn’t
exist. In his book,
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
, published in 1970, Allegro makes a semi-cogent argument for Jesus being a mushroom.”

“Where do you find these nuts?” D.H. laughs. “In the bargain basement bins of Books-R-Us?”

“You shouldn’t be so quick to judge,” Lloyd cautions him. “Allegro had access to information, in the Scrolls, that’s being withheld from the public at the insistence of his academic peers and the Catholic Church. Allegro’s main thesis was that the paleo-Asiatic peoples in the Near East had used mushrooms for shamanic rituals that over time evolved into mushroom-based mystery cults. According to Allegro, the
Amanita muscaria
was known to these ancient cults as the ‘penis mushroom’ and partaking of it often resulted in hallucination-fueled orgies–as one might expect, given a cognomen such as that….”

“Right on!” Jimmy says, pumping his fist.

“Around the time of Jesus, the orgies were attracting the attention of persecuting local authorities (
Romans
, for one), so the cults went into hiding. They started encrypting allegories of their sacred mushroom rituals and mushroom gnosis into adaptations of the old mythologies, as a way of keeping their secrets alive. To this we owe the Jesus stories of the New Testament.
Jesus
, according to Allegro, was a code name for the mushroom, which he traced all the way back to its ancient Sumerian roots.”

“So when Jesus says, ‘I am the bread of life,’ what he’s really talking about is mushroom bread,” Gordon says, trying to understand.

“Well, it makes a certain amount of sense, doesn’t it? He is ‘the living bread that has come down from heaven.’ Remember what Terence McKenna’s
Stropharia cubensis
mushroom said about its intergalactic travels? And how about the phrase, ‘Anyone who eats of my flesh and drinks of my blood will have eternal life’? Instead of a wild-eyed exhortation to cannibalism, maybe this is Jesus the Symbiote Mushroom talking, hoping to hitch a ride on a human nervous system by making promises it may or may not be able to keep. After all, the
Psilocybe
mushrooms that R. Gordon Wasson sampled down in Mexico for a 1957
Life
magazine article were known as
teonanacatl
, or ‘God’s flesh.’”

“So during Holy Communion, the flesh is really supposed to be mushroom flesh and the blood is supposed to be
a mushroom cult leader’s whiz?”
D.H., like Gordon, is doing his best to follow along.

Lloyd nods his head. “As for the Holy Trinity: the Father would be God, the Son would be the Mushroom, and the Holy Ghost would be that strange little mushroom voice that speaks to you after you’ve eaten God’s Son. You also might call it the Logos… but the Logos, I’m convinced, is far more than just a hallucination induced by a mushroom. It’s an infinitely intelligent, sympathetic, and
loving
force in the universe that operates throughout a whole range of frequencies, including those biophotonic pulses in our DNA. The Logos is always trying to speak to us. It never gives up. We can interact with it, but first we need to learn how to listen to it. In ancient Sumerian, as John Allegro explained, the word for
ear
and
wisdom
is the same.”

“And you
believe
this stuff?” Gordon asks. “Jesus was a mushroom and all that?”

“I try to keep an open mind about such things,” says Lloyd. “I’m always looking for answers that others, trapped in consensus reality, might have overlooked. There’s a saying from the Gospel of Thomas that I’m particularly fond of. I’ve known it by heart ever since the Nag Hammadi texts were first translated into English. It’s something Jesus was supposed to have said to Thomas–who was revered by the Syrian Christians as Jesus’ mortal twin, in case you didn’t know. The saying goes:

“
Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will be troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All.
”

“Cool,” says Gordon. He has a lot to think about. It occurs to him that what Jesus was essentially saying was,
The Truth will set you free, but first it’ll piss you off and blow your mind.

“We’ve dallied too long past sundown,” Lloyd says with sudden apprehension. “I shouldn’t have allowed it, but I was enjoying the food and conversation too much… and besides, Esalen isn’t far now.” Quickly, he starts packing up the picnic basket as Jimmy brays:

“Let’s hit the road!”

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

“Onward to Esalen!”

“Land of the Naked Hippie Chicks in Hot Tubs!” Jimmy shouts, matching Lloyd’s enthusiasm as the Bentley exits Limekiln State Park and rolls back onto the Pacific Coast Highway. It seems Jimmy has accompanied Lloyd to Esalen before–or at least heard stories about it.

“I read somewhere that Hunter S. Thompson was the caretaker at Esalen while he was writing his book about the Hells Angels.” Gordon says, twiddling the knob on the Bentley’s bird’s-eye maple glovebox. “Is that true, Lloyd? Do you know?”

“Hunter Thompson did indeed once reside at Esalen–but that was back in the early sixties, before Esalen was
Esalen.
” As the Bentley accelerates, Lloyd’s toupee flaps like a frightened mallard launching off a lake into a stiff breeze. “You should know that Hunter had a rather insalubrious habit of drinking vast quantities of rum and firing high-powered automatic weapons at the local sea life during his so-called ‘caretaker’ duties. I believe he once fatally wounded a bull elephant seal with an AK-47 at close range.”

“That sounds like him,” Gordon says.

“I’ve heard the seagulls in his immediate vicinity suffered a precipitous drop in population as well,” says Lloyd. “The property at the time belonged to Michael Murphy’s grandmother, Bunny Murphy.”

It always starts with a bunny…
thinks Gordon.

“When Michael found out about Hunter’s ballistic transgressions, he banished him and leased the land from Grandma Bunny to start what
Newsweek
has since dubbed ‘the Harvard of the Human Potential Movement.’”

“Or the Yale of Yuppie New Age Narcissism,” D.H. counters, unimpressed. “Didn’t Charles Manson play a concert there a few days before he decided to kill Sharon Tate?”

“I know people who witnessed that so-called ‘concert’ firsthand. Some say the resounding lack of enthusiasm for Manson’s vocal stylings soured him on the whole human race–thereby initiating his career as a mass murderer. In that regard, it’s too bad Esalen was such a tough crowd.”

“Are you sure Manson wasn’t brainwashed at Esalen and then told to go off and kill people like some kind of sick puppy?” Twinker asks from the backseat, where she’s drunkenly slumped across the laps of Jimmy, D.H., and Skip.

All right, Twinker!
thinks Gordon, grinning.
A few glasses of champagne and you’re suddenly one-upping Lloyd as a conspiracy theorist.

Lloyd coolly replies: “Much as I’d like to believe otherwise, that can’t be ruled out as a possibility. Oddly enough, one of Manson’s other victims–Abigail Folger–had also visited Esalen for an extended stay earlier that same summer. Perhaps Manson had been told to go after her… or perhaps disinformation agents associated with the Nixon White House just wanted us to think that for their own nefarious purposes.”

“You have to admit, it’s a weird coincidence,” Twinker slurs.

“Yes it is,” Lloyd agrees. “But those ‘weird coincidences’ just keep piling up once you start paying attention. It’s almost as if the collective unconscious intentionally deploys familiar literary devices such as foreshadowing, shared circumstances, and a limited cast of central characters as a way of stimulating greater reading comprehension for those who, in the timeless leisure of the afterlife, choose to check out the historical facts from the Library of Akashic Records.”

Skip asks, “So you’re saying we get a library card when we die?”

“It makes a certain amount of sense, doesn’t it? If consciousness survives death, wouldn’t your curiosity about life remain intact? Wouldn’t you want to pursue further research? And where’s the best place to do research?”

“A library.” Gordon, for one, certainly knows that.

“So when we’re dead we can just go to this Ass-Kicking Library place and look under M for Manson and get the whole story?” Skip sounds like he desperately wants it to be true.

Lloyd answers, “Someday we’ll know the truth about everything, I hope. I’m also hoping the truth will reveal that our lives had
meaning…
. I’ve often thought of the holographic universe as a vast Borgesian riddle working itself out in the minds of each and every one of us. However, the trouble with such a universe, as I see it, is that misinterpretation can create a shared reality that seems just as real at times as reality-in-truth–provided enough people believe in it. Think of the Holocaust and how fascist propaganda churned out fake doctrines of xenophobic hatred that became real enough to generate a creeping moral leprosy, leading to the death of millions. Similar acts of bad faith have occurred in America and other parts of the world as well–like the trumped-up Gulf of Tonkin Incident, for example, which led to the escalation of the war in Vietnam. When the crazed minds of panting maniacs and poisonous buffoons meet in synchrony, they create an alternate reality–
a conspiracy of false consciousness
–that provides them with the bent justifications they need to murder, rape, and steal. And the innocents of the world suffer for it.”

“So somewhere along the line–maybe at Esalen–Manson must’ve met some people who were just as evil and screwed up as he was,” Gordon surmises.

“If not more so,” Lloyd says.

“He had the Family. What more did he need?” asks Jimmy.

“The Family was made up of followers. The people I’m referring to are natural born leaders–and their dark agendas are often difficult to discern. Are they good? Are they bad? You never know… you just can’t tell at first.”

“Like the Grand Chignon and Ronald Reagan,” says Gordon.
And you
, he thinks, but doesn’t say out loud.

“It’s even more subtle than that,” says Lloyd. “There’s one person I’m thinking of in particular, now that we’ve broached the subject of Esalen’s shadow side. His name is Andrija Puharich. I think I may have mentioned him earlier in connection to Uri Geller.”

“You said he was Geller’s CIA handler,” Gordon reminds him.

“Yes, well, I could be mistaken about that. I have no way of knowing for certain if Puharich is on the CIA’s payroll, although it seems incredibly likely. John Lilly once confided to me that much of his LSD research had been secretly funded under the aegis of the CIA’s MKULTRA program. Tim Leary’s, too. I was hardly surprised, given what I know about the CIA’s interest in mind control and enhanced psychic abilities–and their potential application to military and intelligence operations, which would include assassinations. I’d be even less surprised to find out that Puharich’s activities had been similarly funded. In many ways, he’s their ideal candidate.”

“He sounds like a bastard,” Twinker says, apropos of almost nothing.